The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality:
We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality, experiments measuring religiosity and actual prosocial behavior suggest that this association emerges primarily in contexts where reputational concerns are heightened. Experimentally induced religious thoughts reduce rates of cheating and increase altruistic behavior among anonymous strangers. Experiments demonstrate an association between apparent profession of religious devotion and greater trust. Cross-cultural evidence suggests an association between the cultural presence of morally concerned deities and large group size in humans. We synthesize converging evidence from various fields for religious prosociality, address its specific boundary conditions, and point to unresolved questions and novel predictions.
Ron Bailey at Reason has an article up, Does Religion Make People Nicer?, which ruminates on the implications of the above paper. He concludes:
Shariff and Norenzayan note that while religion remains a powerful facilitator of prosociality in large groups, modern societies have devised secular replacements for Sky Big Brother, including courts, police, and other contract-enforcing institutions. Also, the modern world is headed toward a transparent society in which social monitoring will be nearly as omnipresent as that of a hunter-gatherer band. Increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies will enable anyone to assess your reputation for prosociality with a few mouse clicks. Sky Big Brother is being outsourced to the Web.
Bailey outlines the paper's extended thesis which shows how implicit cognitive reflexes can be co-opted by the concepts promoted and formalized by institutional religions. The important point is that you don't have to be religious to have religious instincts, in large part because religious instincts are probably emergent from normal human cognition. What we might term a religious sensibility is really nothing more than normal human intuitions in particular contexts or compounded together in a specific manner.
I suspect that many readers will be disturbed and uncomfortable with the allusion to a Transparent Society. After all most humans have an instinct for some level of privacy. The first point is that I suspect that the Transparent Society is inevitable. I remember the shock some of my friends expressed when I first Googled their parents in late 1998. Today they wouldn't be shocked. We've renormalized to the expectations of our time. The emergence of Facebook is a symptom, not a driver.
Second, one does have to recall that over the past 10,000 years humans have reordered their social organization a great deal. In the distant past our species lived in small hunter-gatherer bands, and a typical individual might never have met more than a few hundred people face to face. Today the average person can easily run into a few hundred people in an hour if they're busy going about their tasks in a public space. Though our cognitive toolkit retains the marks of its pre-mass society milieu, we've developed institutions, ideas and cultural norms to navigate our dense packed world. We may only be familiar with on the order of 100 people at any given time, but unlike in the past the cast of characters is often in continuous flux.
I tend to agree with those who would claim that the institutional and moralistic religions we see around us are necessarily preconditioned on the mass society. On the anonymity which the multitudes make possible. In a world where anonymity is gone will we return to our hunter-gatherer roots and "uninstall" all the optional software which we've had running in the background just to make do?
Note: I do not believe that a decline of institutional religion will result in the disappearance of supernatural belief.
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I am not sure about the naturalness of religion vs science. I read the introduction of the linked-to paper by Dr McCauley and it is obvious that McCauley is assuming from the outset that certain religious ideas are more natural to humans than certain scientific tendencies.
I beg to differ. In my own case, as a child I had religious people from both my mother's side and father's side, but my mother and father were not strong on religion (although we did go to church regularly because everybody did). By age six I was seriously questioning what I was being taught in Sunday school. I remember at age seven having a very angry encounter with my mother in which I insisted that what I was being taught in Sunday school was baseless and I did not feel the teacher actually knew anything about Jesus. I raised such a ruckus that my Mom agreed I could drop Sunday school. This at age 7, mind you.
At the same age and younger I was infatuated with science stuff. Simple experiements, and in particular the space-race and dinosaurs were main sources of what I consider to be a quite natural attraction to science.
I see it today because I live with a woman with a young child (6 to 8 yrs old during our time as roommates). It's hands-down science as far as his natural attractions go. Left alone, he goes for science toys or engineering type toys (the 100 electronic-circuits kits and Lego construction kits are top attractors). There is a sense of mysticism and he repeatedly tells me he believes in God, but if you sit him in front of the TV, science programming or Star Wars re-runs will win out every time. I have NEVER seen him channel surf for religious programming.
My point being he, like me, may not naturally be an athiest, but that the attraction for scientific inquiry seems at least as natural as the inclination to believe in God.
I also note that the paper's author, Dr. McCauley is a philosopher, not a scientist. I think his paper assumes his conclusions, even though he seems careful to try try to explain his terms. But - and this is a big "but" - he is not rigorously testing his assumptions, but simply laying them out in his introduction.
Even if it seems that I am intuitively rejecting the idea that religion is more natural than science, from an emotional reaction rather than from rationality, that in fact, that would serve to underscore my point.
That is to say, in my case, and my friend's son's case the proclivity towards science is more natural, emotional, and intuitive. Science feels more natural and self-evident to us.
Given that a lot of social conditioning happens to a person even before age 3, it could also be argued that in a stricter religious cultural setting, we would have thought religion more natural. But that would only show the effects of social conditioning, not show whether science or religion was more natural in poeople to begin with.
In my own case
who cares about your case? i stopped reading your comment there.
I agree with much of this and with the idea that religious intuitions are products of normal cognition (a Boolean idea of "belief" is a poor guide to the religious I think). We might however expect producers of religion to reshuffle these intuitions into new sociological structures as public goods provided by effective states displace club goods provided by religions (from welfare to suicide terrorism) and scientific education displaces intuition or at least farms our intuitions differently from the religious establishment. I think a good segment of present religious diversity reflects this ongoing change. Perhaps this means I agree with a thesis of diffuse religiosity, but we might not be able to prognosticate accurately what institutions could be effective in such an environment - hopefully relatively benign ones.
ben, i think political religion was a 19th century response to new conditions....
What makes you suggest that "Star Wars" reflects scientific thought rather than religious thought? I think you've got it backwards.
You're not gonna find kids seeking out televangelists for entertainment (I hope). But you'll commonly find kids' entertainment laced with pseudoreligious, pseudo new-age magical thinking. Star Wars is an example, and the presence of robots and spaceships does not counter that description in any way.
Your statement about the distant past might lead one to believe that all peoples are equidistant from it. But people from the Middle East have had civilisation for longer than Europeans (several thousand years). The northern area was a totally different ecological enviroment (it was cold).
Why would one expect the result of all this to be an across the board set of adaptations. Family structure is not the same across the world. A bit of an anomaly if everyone's cognition is the same.
Yes, I remember reading one of Michael Burleigh's histories of the Third Reich which advanced the civic religion thesis - seems rather plausible. I also think that politicians can manipulate existing religious sentiment - perhaps especially if amorphous enough - for political gain - Palintology comes to mind...
Why would one expect the result of all this to be an across the board set of adaptations.
there are things called experiments and observations. by doing these things people note that it seems non-pathological that a typical human population median point of social modeling is on the order of 150 individuals. since you don't know these studies obviously you wonder why one would expect these results. but ignorance really isn't that profound.
Ouch!
Transparent is certainly what commenting under your own name would make you, people who do this might sometimes have to hold back what they really want to say. Are old deleted comments available in that Internet Archive thing?
I just started reading Darwins Cathedral, the first bolded quote sounds in line with his thinking on group selection. (in humans who can enforce compliance). Social obligations as threats to welbeing if not fulfilled. I get what you are saying about interactions within small bands where a reputation for being sociable is an asset. A persons reputation for demanding respect and taking punitive measures those who cross him (a bit like you sometimes do in the comments )might be relevant too.
Napoleon Chagnon studied a small tribe and being sociable or thought so, counts in ones favour in everyday interactions, but when the chips were down (the axe fight) kinship was very important. Once civilisation got going some peoples seem to have operated with an extended family stucture where one has many obligations to help the extended family and often to marry within it balanced by being able to call on their help.
Other peoples (Europe is the home to most) gradually abandoned extended family structure for monogamy and the nuclear family. Here is the point the Catholic church was opposed to polygamy and cousin marriage (even the most distant) which was in the interests of the nobility.
"It is one of the most remarkable phenomena in all of human history that in the high middle ages many members of the highest and most prosperous strata of society who had the best chances of enjoying earthly pleasures to the full renounced them... The flow of ...candidates was particularly impressive in those areas where the rules of monastic life had been restored ..or even redefined more severely". (The Church In Western Europe, Telllenbach,G. Quoted from:- What Makes Western Culture Unique?)
Of course the down side to this was that many of the most able were absenting themselves from the gene pool in Europe. (This may have been most intensive in Spain where some studies have found a slightly lower IQ, if so it might explain why certain peoples seemed to be so intelligent compared to Spaniards in the middle ages, moreover the general Euro IQ then may have been lower)